and have been for the last two months. I use linux on my desktop, it's nice to be able to have access to the web apps, since I can't very well install the software. Also, the big thing you need to consider when deploying this -
If you use the migration tool and link your AD accounts with Office365, you cannot ever get rid of your local AD because you won't be able to manage your users. We chose to export each user to a PST, and import their PST's into their new Office365 account now that we are one step closer to dumping our expensive and bloated local MS infrastructure.

Also, it IS possible to remove synced users. You run a tool buried in the folder structure of the sync utility, set a flag in the registry for the tool to do a full sync, and have it sync with an empty OU. Works like a champ.

What is it adding over Google apps in your case? It seems to me that if you want to reliably migrate away from MS infrastructure that would be more of a step in the right direction, wouldn't it? Won't your marketing people miss man of the top end features of powerpoint in any case?

What is it adding over Google apps in your case? It seems to me that if you want to reliably migrate away from MS infrastructure that would be more of a step in the right direction, wouldn't it? Won't your marketing people miss man of the top end features of powerpoint in any case?

Well, we did try out google apps. I like it, but I got overruled:)
The main complaints with google apps -
No Lync
No web app versions of Word, Excel, etc ( I'll admit, I like having this option, since I cannot install them and sometimes OO/LO doesn't cut it)
My main complaints against 365 -
Google apps is cheaper, and accomplishes most everything we did before with a local Exchange deployment
It's Microsoft
People might start putting data into the lockbox that is Sharepoint. It's a nightmare migrating dat

Someone should start a petition to our slashdot overlords to allow use of the blink tag. It would be incredibly funny to see all the bright and shiny rounded corner Web 2.1+ crap being defiled by crappy blinking text everywhere, even if only for a day or two.

Not the original poster, but one advantage of Office365 is that you can tie it in with the Cloud AD. The MS infrastructure hardware is run somewhere else to manage your systems, and you use the same authentication for Office 365 access. And as the user mentioned there's Lync which is chat/video like Google, but also allows VOIP, voicemail transcription, etc.

Depending on the size of your company and it's organizational complexity, it's nice to have a local file server that you can manage with AD security groups. It also makes deployment of AV software and managing workstations much more manageable once they're joined to an AD domain as well. Don't discount a local MS infrastructure entirely. It still has its uses.

File serving and AV isn't really MS infrastructure. The MS stuff are the domain controllers, system center manager, DHCP server. Those can be cloud-based. File serving can be a Linux box running SMB to tie into your AD authentication.

While not required, having your workstations joined to a domain does make administration and deployment of 3rd party software much easer now that a trust relationship has been established. Installing an AV server-side package on an MS server is one such example. Administrating a network file share is another provided your drives are formatted NTFS.

It's been awhile, but last time I tried rolling my own Linux based file server (using ext3 FS) and joining it to a domain ended in failure. If you know of a way t

There are other, more reliable ways to push software out to windows workstations...AD is also horrendously insecure, not due to unpatched boxes but due to design flaws in the protocols and authentication methods it uses.

Of course, if you're moving to cloud based apps, you should gradually be able to migrate away from the windows workstations entirely.

What would you use to export your user data from Exchange Server? PSTs will contain all your messages, calendar entries, tasks and notes in one single file, which can then be easily imported into Microsoft's cloud servers. I can't see what is the downside to this file format for this purpose.

I don't know about calendar entries, etc. but to move from Exchange/Outlook to Google Apps you add Google as an IMAP account, and simply copy email between accounts.

There's also an tool in the paid GApps, but it doesn't always (as of 2 years ago) work right. And I don't remember exactly, but once you manually create a top-level folder, sub-folders get copied OK (as labels in GApps, of course).

This is for GApps of course, not MS 365, but the question was how to get data out of Exchange.

Clicked Submit by mistake. The rest of this: We're looking at cloud services as an adjunct, and *maybe* a replacement for our current backup scheme... but nothing more than data backup, ever.

We already have the needed hardware/infrastructure, personnel, recovery in place to ensure 24/7 operations, and we cannot risk losing control of that, as millions of dollars in service contracts with SLAs, etc., would be at stake if we did so.

For us, "the cloud" means in current parlance: "Store all your mission critical data on third-party storage, and then have to rely upon them for availability that we've not only already created, but cannot ultimately ensure nor control, regardless of contracts with them".

And that's just the operational/production side of the equation. Then there's security issues, privacy issues, etc.

Sorry, ain't gonna happen, not any time soon.

Call me old-fashioned, but all things considered, a "mass migration" to the cloud, company-wide would be a very bad thing for us at this point, despite internal pressure: I've had sales people in our company ask "So, when are we moving everything to the cloud?"... as though that was a magical solution to our problems: We're growing, rapidly, you see, and they see it as a "magic bullet" to address file server storage constraints, mailbox size limitations (one of our sales person's Exchange mailbox is 4GB... and he refuses to archive it, despite his own admission that he's not needed the email dating back nearly 8 years, ever).

Attempts to explain that doing so would involve the need for enormous increases in external bandwidth at all of our offices, with commensurate cost to ensure availability fall on deaf ears: For them, bandwidth is "magic" - they get faster Internet access at home, you see, and repeatedly tell us that, and they simply cannot understand why we don't switch to "local consumer broadband provider" for all of our needs, based upon their experience at home.

Anyway: Moving to the cloud might be viable for some companies, but it's not for us.

This isn't really paranoia, it's common sense! Putting your mission critical apps on someone else's servers is just silly. What happens when your net is down (and it will be)? What if their servers go down and you have to go tell your shareholders why everyone is idle?

Bad analogy. Your existing local installation can perform many useful tasks with local speed, and easier security/privacy. A power line is useful, but relying on it when you have reasonably easy to operate solar panels already on your roof is a bit silly.

We adopted MSFT's big-brand business suite, SharePoint 2010, several months before it launched last May. It took a full 6 months to set up the environment, plus additional time to make it even remotely useful for the enterprise. The level of in-house expertise and infrastructure needed to make a business run on MSFT products (Outlook, SharePoint, etc) is obscene.

And it's quickly becoming outdated, sorry MSFT.

At another business (I switched, thankfully!), we use Google Enterprise. The level of support we need to provide for e-mail and document collaboration is radically lower and feels fundamentally different. Instead of FIGHTING with our systems to keep them online, we can innovate and develop new and cool things because our time doesn't disappear into the black hole of "Correlation ID errors" and arcane Outlook glitches.

MSFT, I hope you learn what it means to provide cloud services, and do provide a worthy competitor to Google and other providers! Then, we'd have some exciting innovation! In the meantime, pah... sorry guys. I know you work VERY hard. But PLEASE tell Ballmer to step aside so you can do something that isn't designed by the Corporate Committee!

We adopted MSFT's big-brand business suite, SharePoint 2010, several months before it launched last May. It took a full 6 months to set up the environment, plus additional time to make it even remotely useful for the enterprise. The level of in-house expertise and infrastructure needed to make a business run on MSFT products (Outlook, SharePoint, etc) is obscene.

And it's quickly becoming outdated, sorry MSFT.

At another business (I switched, thankfully!), we use Google Enterprise. The level of support we need to provide for e-mail and document collaboration is radically lower and feels fundamentally different. Instead of FIGHTING with our systems to keep them online, we can innovate and develop new and cool things because our time doesn't disappear into the black hole of "Correlation ID errors" and arcane Outlook glitches.

MSFT, I hope you learn what it means to provide cloud services, and do provide a worthy competitor to Google and other providers! Then, we'd have some exciting innovation! In the meantime, pah... sorry guys. I know you work VERY hard. But PLEASE tell Ballmer to step aside so you can do something that isn't designed by the Corporate Committee!

We had the same experience with Sharepoint. We embraced it wholly, too, amidst the shitstorm of try to get to work right. When we finally got fed up with weekly expensive calls back to Redmond, we got sucker punched when we discovered the back end database structure is an opaque nightmare and Sharepoint was essentially holding our data hostage. We won't touch sharepoint again, and I have heard similar experiences from other companies in my area.

If you're comparing Sharepoint with Google Docs, I'm not sure you fully understand what Sharepoint brings to the table.

I'm actually wrapping up a Sharepoint 2010 installation this month. It's on time and budget. The company now has their entire Workflow process, including custom C# workflow/document rules that were developed specifically for their needs.

Google Docs and Sharepoints are not even similar products. If you can go with either for your needs, then by all means go with Google Docs. Because that means you're really not using Sharepoint properly.

SharePoint is a decent platform for several tasks the problem I've seen is that overzealous sales consultants come in and tell management all applications should be hosted in SharePoint and that usually doesn't workout very well.

SharePoint 2010 is easier to manage they have simplified several features and PowerShell is supported for scripting. However Some parts of the product such as the BCS service are very time consuming to configure and use even for simple tasks.

We adopted MSFT's big-brand business suite, SharePoint 2010, several months before it launched last May. It took a full 6 months to set up the environment, plus additional time to make it even remotely useful for the enterprise. The level of in-house expertise and infrastructure needed to make a business run on MSFT products (Outlook, SharePoint, etc) is obscene.

I'm not surprised to hear this, or the other comments agreeing with you. I looked at Office 365 when it launched in beta, and my impression was that it had some things to offer businesses, particularly smaller business who don't want the hassles of managing their own Exchange Servers. But when it came to SharePoint, I was kind of taken aback that Microsoft had just... given you a SharePoint Server. "Here ya go!" Not only did the SharePoint UI not resemble the UI of the rest of the Office 365 suite at all -

" It took a full 6 months to set up the environment"
Maybe you should have had someone who knew what they were doing to set it up. I don't particularly like Sharepoint for a number of reasons but I have had to work with it on occasion in a couple of large corporations. Installing and configuring Sharepoint on multiple servers never took over 2 - 3 days at most. Building Sharepoint Apps is also pretty straight forward and we rolled out the first apps in about 3 - 4 weeks which wasn't bad considering a lot of

I would dearly love to know the origin of this idea that Microsoft have a battalion of salesmen who take CIOs out to strip clubs.

I know, I know. I was just using a little satire to point out how the decision to waste a lifetime working with some chunk of Microsoft technology is rarely going to be made by anyone who actually does hands on work with said technology, and the things considered in the decision will likely have nothing to do with the technology or the people who'll use and/or maintain it.

Does it have the horrible ribbon thing that the newer versions of Office have? If so, I think it will have a hard time catching on (I tried that "See How it Works" link on their site but they wanted me to install Silverlight). No one I know took OOo or Symphony seriously until MS came out with the ribbon interface. It was at that point they felt the need to see what type of competition was out there.

Does it have the horrible ribbon thing that the newer versions of Office have? If so, I think it will have a hard time catching on (I tried that "See How it Works" link on their site but they wanted me to install Silverlight). No one I know took OOo or Symphony seriously until MS came out with the ribbon interface. It was at that point they felt the need to see what type of competition was out there.

The web app versions of Word and Excel look very similar to their desktop counterparts, including the damn ribbon.
The rich version of Outlook does not for whatever reason.

I don't understand why they don't just make the ribbon an option. I can never find anything on it. Fortunately, I rarely have to. I just use Excel when I need to view a spreadsheet that won't play nice with Symphony. I feel sorry for the guy who has to author them.

So you've been using a major UI for years and can't "remotely get used to the damn thing"? Does this speak more about the ribbon or you?Seriously, it's not that bad. It even pretty much makes sense when you try to get used to it.As with the differences between a GUI and Command line, it's probably not the best way for performing repeated, complex tasks, but for the majority of users it is user-friendly and intuitive.

I'm baffled by the intense dislike of the Ribbon. I expected to hate it, but very quickly found it a great thing - probably one of the nicer changes that Office has seen in a long time.

Agreed. It was a little annoying in Office 2007 because some applications used it, and other didn't. Outlook 2007 didn't use it, but it was used when creating messages, which was just ridiculously inconsistent. Now that Office 2010 uses it consistently across the board, I find it better in many ways (although worse in a few). For most simple tasks, it exposes the available options better.

In my experience, most people that use it for a month or so have no complaints.

1. They could have grouped things more logically without disregarding 30 years of UI conventions (pull-down menus). Talk about throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

2. A great many of the things they've done in the ribbon that make sense I've actually had in my Word 97/2000/XP/2003 toolbar for something like a decade now. Yes, the stock Office toolbar had a crap layout. The solution was to fix that, not introduce a whole new everything. See #1.

The "drop down menu" system was a result of many years of academic research by places like Xerox Palo Alto center (where they also came up with ideas such as GUI, mouse, object-oriented programming etc) and places like IBM research labs. The end result was a compromise that catered equally to people who are capable of remembering complex, multi-level structures and those who were impaired in this capacity but instead could remember things by

There are two enormous problems with the ribbon - especially in Excel.

For starters, dingbats whose memory is positional/visual (in other words, folks who have no idea what the word logic means and just wander around till they see a picture they vaguely remember) generally aren't going to be heavy users of programs like Excel, because they're too loopy to be building many spreadsheets. So you've just optimized your menu structure for people who can't use your tool effectively anyhow, because they're incoher

Or I could just avoid Office like the plague whenever possible, as I've always done. Unfortunately, my boss doesn't let me get away with avoiding it completely, but he doesn't realize I use Symphony 90% of the time (damn you Excel spreadsheets!).

The last thing I want to do is spend my time learning where the icons are on a MS interface. I could be doing important things, like trolling Slashdot.

Seriously dude, just get used to it. The ribbon has been out for 4 years now, for crying out loud. It is actually quite convenient if you take the time to familiarize yourself with it. Or you could just whine and never learn anything, I guess.

Yeah dammit! If I like the ribbon and find it easy to use, then you must too! Even if you don't like it, get used to it! There's no way that the previous UI was better! One size fits all and if you can't handle the ribbon, you're stupid.

(in reality, I don't like the ribbon and find it to be harder to use than the previous menus, I can never remember where things are - my artistically inclined wife, however, loves it - I guess she's more spatially/icon oriented and I'm more textually oriented. Fortunately, I

The only thing that still bugs me about it (and i use office 2007/2010 semi-regularly) is that icons change when i downsize the window. It kicks the familiarity i have with the interface in the balls almost every time, but Ive gotten used to it.

Sometimes I like the changes they have made, sometimes I still hate some of it. Ive used it so long, however, that looking for something in OOo or older versions of office is a waste of time. Ill never find what I want in those anymore. *snaps fingers* oh well.

Really, it's not just competing with Google's offering. It's competing with Apple and anyone in the future that follows Apple's iCloud for Documents lead by using native apps as a front end for seamless cloud syncing behind the scenes. People have dinged Google Apps over the years because they're allegedly not as good as native apps (I'm not taking a stance on that either way in this comment), but there's a middle ground between an app that's either only on your machine or only on the web, and it looks like

Can somebody please explain what the point of this is? I don't get it. A file server isn't complicated or expensive. I do own a small business, and I read all of the marketing stuff, but I can't find a single reason why I'd switch from plain ol' Office + fileserver + hosted Exchange. If anything, I'd have to spend MORE money on bandwidth.

In a distributed environment (such as multiple ppl working from home), this makes good sense. In addition, you do not have to deal with admining much, etc. There is a decent use for this. However, Office 365 will NOT be a good choice. It will no doubt be designed to lock you into MS and only MS (though it may support apple with an inferior approach just to keep the FTC goons off their back).

A file server isn't complicated or expensive - IF you happen to have someone with half a clue in your organization. Believe me, not everyone has that luxury - the world is pretty "stupid" out there. I think a lot of small (non-tech, e.g. a small florist or whatever) businesses would find this simplifies things for them.

Collaboration: You can have multiple people easily editing the same documentPortability: Your documents are both at the office and on your sales person's laptop in China.Ease of Setup: You just start spending the monthly fee and everything is setup and running. You don't have to shop for a server, configure your sharepoint server, setup a VPN etc.?Security?: In the case of our business we have no good way to remotely access data. That's because we don't want to risk our network being compromised. So we

I stopped reading TFA at "For instance, the Office Web Apps version of PowerPoint doesn’t have the high-performance video editing tools found in the desktop version..." They actually used High-Performance and PowerPoint in the same sentence. You've got to be kidding me.

I agree with all the Sharepoint stuff. And cloud hosted documents is not a one-size-fits-all... although I can see the benifit.
But ignore all that. Just look at Exchange Hosting. A company I'm with is paying about $14/month per user for Exchange hosting with ActiveSync (for iphone syncing) and a "vast" limit of 150MB/user mailbox. And thats with a year's commitment. For 7 users this is quite cheep compared to managing our own exchange server (complete with MS Server licensing and a M$PhD to adminis

I agree with all the Sharepoint stuff. And cloud hosted documents is not a one-size-fits-all... although I can see the benifit.But ignore all that. Just look at Exchange Hosting. A company I'm with is paying about $14/month per user for Exchange hosting with ActiveSync (for iphone syncing) and a "vast" limit of 150MB/user mailbox.

IIRC the licensing for companies wanting to run hosted exchange is quite dear - you got a bargain at $14/month, my guess is that the reason you had such a tight quota is because the only way the hosting company could make it work is by offering a cheap headline price then charging through the nose for an increased quota.

What this means, of course, is that anyone who went out and bought the necessary software licenses to offer hosted Exchange to their customers has been screwed because all of a sudden the pr

Office 365 [newstechnica.com], Microsoft’s pay-as-you-go answer to Google Docs, delivers the same delight you’re used to from Office on your PC, only slower and clunkier and only working on Internet Explorer. Remember Internet Explorer? Of course you do!

Microsoft Online Services have marketed Office 365 directly to your bosses, who have little people like you to do all the bits that involve actually touching a computer. It promises a fully integrated solution to your daily working needs, with the reliability of Ho

Fact of the matter is that VERY few people are fired for choosing a Microsoft product that does not live up to the sales pitch. Many contractors or government bureaucrats will choose and sell to their superiors Office 365 as a "cloud" offering even though really isn't (Of course try to pin down what "cloud" means....that is a problem unto itself).

On the other hand if said contractor chose Google Apps and the user base revolts or it fails they could very well get canned.

I believe that there should be a free version for peronal use, but this is still a great tool.

You're probably just a troll, but why should there be a free version for personal use when there isn't any "personal use" for the product? Pretty much everything you get from Office 365 is for collaborating and communicating with other people (SharePoint Server, Exchange Server, Lync, etc.). If all you want is the Office Web Apps, cloud storage from Microsoft, Webmail, and stuff like that, then there are other ways to get that from Microsoft free for personal use.

What do we do on day 366? And is that February 29? Or December 31? Or January 1? Help me, Microsoft!

It's okay: we won't have another leap day until 2016, so Microsoft didn't need to code that logic into their software. 365 days is enough for anyone.

Don't worry: in 2015, Microsoft will release a new version, Office 366, which will offer you the full yearly experience for only one of the cheap monthly prices listed below (assuming you pick the right plan)!

Just FYI, you don't need any local software installed, in fact you don't even need windows. I have it open in a browser on my Debian laptop right now, Slashdot in another tab.

Do you have access to all functionality? If you go to Microsoft Office 365's system requirements page [microsoft.com], it specifically lists certain versions of MS Office (and the Windows OS) as being requirements for this. At the very top of that page it states:

Yes, you have access to it -- but "having the full Office 365 experience" means you're not limited to editing documents in Web-based apps, you can use the desktop Office suite. There are components that integrate the desktop Office apps with the Office 365 services (albeit not very well, in my experience). The catch is that you need Office 2007 or later. So what it's saying is, if you want the full experience, including the ability to use a real word processor, spreadsheet, etc., with Office 365's hosted se

I seriously doubt it. ANd if it does, my bet is that it will fail within 2 years.

I work in an organization where my department is all Linux, and the rest of the company is Windows XP or 7. Moving to Office 365 for me has been a benefit, actually, because with the exception of Lync I can access all the web versions of the apps using Iceweasel/Firefox in my linux machine. As far as Apple goes, I hear there is a web version of Lync you can use because Apple can run Silverlight. So, if like me you are all FOSS, the only thing you are missing out on is Lync.

(no vba && no addins) == "No use in engineering" which in my case, means no use at all. I guess I could ummm... figure out which car is cheaper over 10 years based on a difference in MPG, but other than that nope, no use.

Little background, i never even heard of sharepoint until i started at the consulting company and within a year i was troubleshooting and fixing installs.

That's typical software consulting in the Micorsoft ecosystem for you, just like that expensive unsupervised MS Exchange consultant that managed to set the mail servers at the company I was doing work for as an open fucking relay.